Google exec boosts GOP data effort

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt may have helped Barack Obama build a political technology juggernaut, but now another top Google executive is trying to help Republicans catch up.

Michele Weslander Quaid, who serves as the company’s “Innovation Evangelist” and chief technology officer for its public-sector division, is joining the board of directors of Voter Gravity, a campaign technology company that serves GOP candidates and conservative groups.

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It’s a bit of a political coming-out for Weslander Quaid, who joined Google in 2011 and had not previously been active in partisan politics.

The move comes as Google, which had become known in Washington as a reliable source of campaign cash and technology talent to Democrats, is working to diversify its political footprint. The tech giant has pumped cash into conservative groups and hired an array of Republicans to interface with the press and politicians, including former Rep. Susan Molinari, who became head of its Washington office in 2012, as well as former George W. Bush aide Rob Saliterman and GOP campaign flak Jill Hazelbaker.

But Weslander Quaid is certainly among – if not the – highest-ranking employee to lend expertise to a Republican tech company. She worked for a decade in the private sector as an engineer and data scientist, but was recruited after the 2001 terrorist attacks by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, eventually working in senior technology roles for the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department during the administrations of both George W. Bush and Obama.

Though she had been a registered Republican, Weslander Quaid switched her registration to independent around the time she entered government and has not donated to federal candidates of either party or openly affiliated with any political groups or companies until now.

At Google, Weslander Quaid sees her role partly as “translat(ing) between Silicon Valley speak and government dialect,” she told Entrepreneur magazine, which named her one of the seven “Most Powerful Women to Watch in 2014” She added “I act as a bridge between the two cultures.”

In recent years, Democrats have opened a major technology advantage over Republicans, who singled out their data deficit as a contributing cause in their 2012 losses. In its post-election autopsy report, the Republican National Committee implored the Party to focus on “the establishment of a new culture driven by data, technology, analytics, and personal contact,” partly by establishing “working relationships and open lines of communication with thought leaders in Silicon Valley to ensure the Party is at the forefront of new developments and trends in digital technology.”

Weslander Quaid would seem to fit that bill precisely, and in announcing her new position with Voter Gravity, the company’s founder and CEO Ned Ryun said “she brings Google’s belief that if you focus on the user, all else will follow.” That, Ryun said in a statement is “exactly that type of thinking that we want to see with Voter Gravity.”

Voter Gravity offers voter data and applications that use it to mobilize supporters and get out the vote. It is among a crowded field of conservative tech firms competing for the business of Republican candidates and groups eager to catch up to their Democratic rivals. A predecessor firm called Political Gravity that launched in 2012 provided data services to the Alabama Republican Party and an array of candidates and committees that skewed towards the tea party-end of the spectrum, including Ted Cruz and Todd Akin, as well as FreedomWorks and the Madison Project. That firm split and Voter Gravity was established after Election Day, pledging to make its software available to Republican and conservative candidates and committees across the spectrum. Last month, it announced it had secured $2 million in investments and also added to its board Matt Schlapp, a former Bush White House political director, who had lobbied for Koch Industries and helped launch the RNC-affiliated voter database Data Trust, which has struggled to gain traction.